Abstract:

Virtual view synthesis is one of the most important techniques to realize Free viewpoint TeleVision (FTV) and Three-Dimensional (3D) video. In this paper, we propose a view synthesis method to generate high quality intermediate views in such applications and new evaluation metrics named as SPSNR and TPSNR to measure spatial and temporal consistency, respectively. The proposed view synthesis method consists of five major steps: depth preprocessing, depth-based 3D warping, depth-based histogram matching, base plus assistant view blending, and depth-based hole-filling. The efficiency of the proposed view synthesis method has been verified by evaluating the quality of synthesized images with various metrics such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural SIMilarity (SSIM), DCT-based Video Quality Metric (VQM), and the newly proposed metrics. We have also confirmed that the synthesized images are objectively and subjectively natural.